digiCC workshops

A series of workshops on digital engagement for community councillors ran from January 2015 to March 2016. These were designed to explore and share Community Councillors’ own methods of digital engagement.

This page contains the key findings from the workshops, along with links to presentations by the Scottish Government’s community empowerment team, the Improvement Service and the Democratic Society, Edinburgh Napier University and others. There are also links to the outputs from the discussions which underpin the findings.

Many resources produced at or for the workshops are listed on the resources for CCs page.

Key findings

Many CCs find it difficult to recruit sufficient members to develop and maintain digital engagement channels. Especially in rural areas, they tend to suffer poor internet connectivity, and LAs are generally not in a position to offer extensive support.

There is reluctance to go beyond providing information such as minutes or news about local events. For instance, while many CCs use Facebook, less than a third have enabled multi-way conversations.

There is clearly wide variation in LA support for CCs, with some community councillors unaware of the supporting role of CCLOs and other relevant LA officials.

There are already many lapsed CC online presences (Ryan and Cruickshank, 2014), so while there is a clear appetite for hands-on demonstrations and guidance about how to create online presences, training must start with planning for the human resources necessary to maintain them. A time budget is needed for adding content to websites, in addition to the time taken to find appropriate content.

Secondly, modern blog-based platforms enable creation of websites with no requirement for coding skills, but the content and structure do need to be carefully planned. Models and templates can be useful here – as can a directory of good examples.